I can't remember the names of all of the parts of the CIA right now, there are two, but Carter ended up having 5 percent of the Clandestine Services fired.
that's it.
Main funder of the US Communist Party during the COINTELPRO era was... surprise.. the FBI, they wanted to use the CP to keep tabs on possible spying or agitation efforts by Soviet Union's in the US.
>Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons...
...I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that...
...I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted
I'm sure this is going to be used by anarcho capitalist types and the media to say Milei's program of cutting public services is noble and great and here's the proof. I feel like I must be taking crazy pills though. If the Argentinian gov needs 40 billion from the US to continue functioning, how does that mean Milei's policies are working? It's like if I decide to use a car to drive 1000 miles, but I only buy enough gas for 500 miles, but a dude at the midpoint in my journey offers to lend me enough money for the next 500 miles of gas if I kick all Chinese people out of my car in return, and then I return and say see due to my amazing thought leadership my car has double the gas mileage now.
The argentine government is currently balancing meeting its current fiscal needs with avoiding the money printing scheme. That means it needs to attract buyers for its bonds instead of using the printing press. That means markets must be confident of Argentina's continued recovery, or investors wont be willing to pay sufficient prices for those bonds to sell. The reason Milei went to the US is because Argentine bond prices collapsed following a victory of the Peronist (that's the former ruling, socialist party) in Buenos Aires. With low bond prices, there was no way to continue that program, so Milei went to the US. On the other hand, this latest electoral victory has restored market confidence, and Argentine binds have strengthened.
These problems have much less to do with libertarianism per se than the practical problem of funding a massive welfare state without utilizing a destructive amount of money printing. Milei is walking a tightrope of unwinding this system slowly. The problem is endemic to having a massive welfare state than it is to libertarianism, and it is one reason why libertarians (also, bog standard neoliberals) are critical of having a massive government. When the government has an extremely large balance sheet, so large that its taxation and redistribution schemes are negative sum, it is only a matter of time before the whole thing comes crashing down. That's where the economy was headed before Milei. The collapse was avoided, albiet narrowly, but that doesn't mean everything is suddenly normal again. The road to recovery will be a long one.
To use your car analogy, the previous peronist parties set up a 1000 mile family trip, bought a quarter of the gas, and then when has started running out wrote a bunch of gas IOUs and pretended that the IOUs were a substitute for real gas. The responsibke adult comes in, and is desperately trying to find ways to trade IOUs or anything else that's available for some gas so that the family can survive and get home. That means that the family might even have to skip a meal or two, which is painful in the present. But it's all a sacrifice in service of ensuring the family's survival over actually starving in the desert when they realized IOUs don't power cars.
Technically Perón was more like a Fascist than a Socialist, modeling his dictatorship fairly closely on that of his friend Mussolini, but especially in later years Peronism adopted Socialist political positions to an even greater extent than the earlier Fascist parties had. Still, the right-wing death squads hunting down and killing Socialists in Perón's later years were Peronists. So were their victims, but Perón ultimately backed the former rather than the latter.
Kirchner-era Peronism, though just as thoroughly based on social-justice rhetoric as Perón ever was, never approached its level of state enterprises like the Justicialist car and IAPI; despite renationalization of Aerolíneas, YPF, and the pension system, there was no Kirchnerist equivalent of Airbus, Ariane, or Systembolaget. So recent Peronism is far less Socialist in practice even than current France and Sweden, much less Bolshevik Russia.
>I'm sure this is going to be used by anarcho capitalist types and the media to say Milei's program of cutting public services is noble and great and here's the proof. I feel like I must be taking crazy pills though. If the Argentinian gov needs 40 billion from the US to continue functioning, how does that mean Milei's policies are working?
Socialists have run argentina for many decades. It wasnt going well and they gave Milei a mandate to fix Argentina. If the people just voted in a landslide confirming their continued approval. Then we can conclude those who are best to judge, the people, think it's working.
> It's like if I decide to use a car to drive 1000 miles, but I only buy enough gas for 500 miles, but a dude at the midpoint in my journey offers to lend me enough money for the next 500 miles of gas if I kick all Chinese people out of my car in return, and then I return and say see due to my amazing thought leadership my car has double the gas mileage now.
In your scenario you assign no blame at all to the previous governments? You completely ignore and discount why the people decided to give him a mandate?
Perhaps Argentinian citizens take the long view and decided Milei's policies are the best route of 'the hole', or maybe they decided the US's offer of 40 billion dollars only if they elected Milei again is the more likely scenario.
Milei's seemed spectacularly unpopular only 3 weeks ago.
The UCR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_Civic_Union is nominally a member of the Socialist International, and many decades ago was roughly aligned with Socialism, but in recent decades their politics mostly favor big landowners and other big businesses. Instead of running their own presidential candidate in 02023, they backed the mano dura Patricia Bullrich, notable for being the only major candidate more right-wing than Milei; he made her his Minister of Security. They did hold the presidency for two years until the crisis in 02001, and previously with Alfonsín in the 80s. They've voted in favor of a lot of Milei's initiatives in Congress; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_National_Congress lists them as "independent".
Libertarians and Conservatives can all wish for a smaller government and slash things apart in America - it's not going to change the fact that America is a corrupt socialist country which runs semis, bails out billionaires, subsidizes farmers, and uses taxpayer money to enrich business owners.
The only difference between American socialism and Argentinian socialism was that Argentinian socialism pretended to help the poor but America doesn't even pretend to help the poor.
Snap, Chip, ssi, ssdi, medicaid, medicare (since recipients don't pay their way), ACA subsidies, progressive income tax (half of us pay no federal tax at all), 1-12 schooling/daycare (often with free lunch, sometimes also free breakfast)
Big brothers/sisters, salvation army, habitat for humanity, red cross, food banks too numerous to list, Shriners hospitals
Oh, forgot about the billions Los Angeles has spent on homeless housing
A Socialist would argue the private money spent use to the private charities you just listed should have gone to the government through taxation originally, and that the government should provide services and a safety net for all instead.
> Snap, Chip, ssi, ssdi, medicaid, medicare (since recipients don't pay their way), ACA subsidies, progressive income tax (half of us pay no federal tax at all), 1-12 schooling/daycare (often with free lunch, sometimes also free breakfast)
Literally the things held hostage for politics right now? How can you claim America helps the poor when we are literally living a government shutdown where poor are held hostage?
> Big brothers/sisters, salvation army, habitat for humanity, red cross, food banks too numerous to list, Shriners hospitals
These are not government. This is about people helping people. Some American people are helpful to each other. But the societal unit of government isn't - aka - there are people who don't want to help others at all.
> America at least "pretends"
American people try really hard - especially in blue states. But American government system holds people hostage. The work requirements, the constant paperwork, the sudden ineligibility - this is all uniquely American - designed to not disburse the benefits that people may be entitled to. America has the pretence of programs but if they truly wanted to help the poor, they'd make the programs truly usable - not hostage to political processes and eligibility corner cases.
Every country is more than its government. The original assertion was that America doesn't pretend to care about the poor.
Apparently, the assertion should have been "America doesn't care about the poor as much as I feel they should and no evidence you bring contrariwise will change my mind".
It reminds me of the houses in the gated communities with "no borders" signs in the manicured lawns.
How do you define socialism? I don't believe that we the people or the state collectively own the means of production in any major industry. Private ownership by capitalists is still the dominant economic system in the US.
The US literally purchased shares of Intel - thus owning means of production.
The US also bails out a group of people all the time. The group is called the rich.
Furthermore, it subsidizes select groups like big ag.
Except these, the US is predominantly capitalistic but so was Argentina. Their populace was fed up with the pretense of helping the poor while bailing out oligarchs. America doesn't seem to pretend to help the poor. Poors are undesirables.
Owning part of one company in one sector is not socialism unless you think nearly every country in the world since the invention of the limited company is socialist?
“Bailing out the rich” isn’t socialist is it? What do you think “socialist” means?
I don’t think you understand why the word “socialist” scares so many people. It’s not a word you can just slap on anything to make it “bad”, many people are actually scared about the underlying ideas not the word.
Some Americans seem to just think socialism=bad “because the CIA and the NYT does propaganda”. You may think America is bad and I may agree with you, that doesn’t make it socialist.
In the GDR you couldn’t start a private enterprise without a license. Any enterprise doing anything.
In socialist Burma, there were no privately-owned factories _at all_.
In Czechoslovakia the constitution banned a private company from employing anyone other than the owner of the company.
In Soviet Russia you needed a permit to move city. If you were a farmer you were unlikely to get that permit. You work for the collective farm, the government set the price they would pay you for your produce, and you couldn’t move city to a new job.
I hope these examples show why “the us government is socialist partly because it owns shares in Intel and partly because it’s a lender-of-last-resort for rich people” sounds fatuous.
I'll tell you why you are wrong - you are wrong because you think that real socialism is only one that maps exactly to a prior example. You think it can't be real socialism if there is even one edge case that differs from a pre-existing example.
Your argument is a variant of the straw man fallacy. Look it up.
I think myself and the other poster are mainly taking issue in your use of a specific term "socialism." I think you could argue that if the US owned 51% stake in Intel, you could argue that would be socialism. I've heard the term "socialize" applied in similar conversations such as "privatize the profits, socialize the losses," which I believe is a more accurate rephrasing of your original point.
I haven't been able to defeat the paywall here, but what mandate and what revolution, and what is so free market about taking in 20 to 40 billion from the US in exchange for a promise to push Chinese business interests out of the country? At least the Chinese were building stuff in Argentina. The US will just hold stuff hostage like Paul Singer.
I don't think the US gov interfering in the elections of other countries with a massive lake of cash is very 'free market'. The US has a decades long history of promoting neo-liberal policies in Argentina ( though some economists might argue that it actually started in Argentina and migrated to America ). If this is 'free market', I don't think the word has any meaning anymore.
There's also a non zero chance that Trump will get distracted or changes his mind and it the Bailout just doesn't happen.
I think building stuff is fine. The Chinese foreign policy seems to be building stuff in other countries, and using the new infra as leverage to promote Chinese interests in the future.
Lately the US just seems to threaten countries with Tactical bombing, no building infra.
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